Confessions of a Forty-Something F**k Up: The Funniest WTF AM I DOING? Novel of the Year (Confessions, 1)

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Similarly, she welcomes the opening up of discussion around the menopause. “It used to be a dirty word and something to fear, but midlife now isn’t what it used to be. I have a picture of my grandmother at 45 and she looks like an old lady.” Because Nell is determined. Next year things are going to be very different. It’s time to turn her life around. For me, and I think so many women, there was this expectation that I would have my life sorted by the time I reached 40,” says Potter, 50. “We have to marry, have kids, get the yoga body and the great career. And my girlfriends and I really experienced that pressure through our thirties, when we were made to feel time was running out – that we weren’t allowed to be a mess by the time we hit the big 40.”

Yet only recently have a broader selection of messy, unfiltered female characters entered the zeitgeist, primarily through our TV screens, with Phoebe Waller-Bridges’s Fleabag, Sara Pascoe’s Out of Her Mind, Katherine Ryan’s The Duchess and Lucy Prebble and Billie Piper’s I Hate Suzie all proving that it is possible for a woman to own both her flaws and failures. I’ve had that title in my head since my late thirties,” says author Alexandra Potter, “when I used to moan to my friends, ‘Oh God, I’m going to be a forty-something f--- up.’ So I really fought for it!” Then there’s the stigma of not being a mother, which is why Potter was adamant her heroine should remain childless. “Just look at how we talk about Jennifer Aniston, when from the look of things she has a fantastic life. But unfortunately women are measured by that.” Potter says she doesn’t personally mind the constant, casual questions about motherhood, “and I realise why they come up, socially, but I know that for a lot of friends who couldn’t have children those questions can be a trigger”. All of these pressures and stigmas – aren’t many of them propagated not by men but women, though? “Women do have a competitive streak, but I think that’s in life generally, and on the contrary I have always found them to be very supportive of one another.”A book for anyone who’s ever worried life isn’t going to plan, Confessions of a Forty-Something F–k Up by Alexandra Potter will make you laugh, and it might even make you cry. But most importantly, it will remind you that you’re not alone, because we’re all in this together.

A funny and heartfelt novel for any woman who wonders how the hell she got here and why life isn't quite how she imagined it was going to be.The inspiration for NOT DEAD YET, ABC’s “Most Watched Comedy Debut in More Than Four Years” ( Deadline) She cites the miscarriage scene in Fleabag as a perfect example of this. “That has happened to friends, who have had one in the toilet at work, for example, and then had to rush into a meeting.” She pauses. “I think it’s very difficult for us to be vulnerable, but when we allow ourselves to be, like Chrissy Teigen did with her miscarriage and then Meghan Markle with her New York Times essay, that’s when we get that real connection – because we’re being honest and real.”